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For more than two years, since the start of the war in Gaza, Israel has barred members of the international press from entering the territory, apart from occasional highly controlled embeds. During that time, reporting by Palestinian journalists has proliferated widely, documenting famine, destruction, and death. Last month, some two hundred press outlets participated in a blackout campaign, organized by Reporters Without Borders, advocating for access—which Israel’s foreign ministry characterized as playing politics: “The reports we see in the global media regarding Gaza do not tell the real story there. They tell the campaign of lies that Hamas spreads.” Last week, an Israeli Supreme Court hearing on access was pushed back, after a series of delays. Even now, after the ceasefire, the ban on journalists continues.
Oren Persico—a staff writer at the Seventh Eye, an Israeli media criticism publication—told me about a Hebrew word, hasbara, which is a catchall for the ways Israel attempts to control coverage. “Every time Israel does something horrific, then everybody thinks, ‘We have a hasbara problem,’” he said. “There’s only so much you can do when the reality is so horrendous.” Blocking members of the foreign press, in his view, is a calculated public relations strategy, alongside efforts to delegitimate Palestinian reporters: as +972, an Israeli outlet, has found, there is a unit of the Israeli military tasked with linking journalists in Gaza to Hamas. It’s easier, Persico told me, to bolster support for Israel by arguing that coverage from journalists in Gaza “might be fake and it might be exaggerated and you should take it with a grain of salt. It’s much harder if there is a reporter from CNN or AP who comes in.”
Israel’s Foreign Press Association (FPA) first filed a petition to the country’s Supreme Court requesting access to Gaza in December of 2023. It was rejected the next month; the judges ruled that the ban was a “balanced and reasonable policy” resulting from “extreme security circumstances” and “the tangible risks involved in issuing independent travel permits to journalists.” Hearings on a second petition, filed in September of 2024, have been put off repeatedly. The FPA was optimistic that last week’s hearing, in the wake of a peace agreement, might finally lead to a change. Instead, lawyers for the Israeli government said that, “in light of the new state of affairs”—the ceasefire—they needed time to update their press policy. The government was granted a thirty-day extension—though the ceasefire appears increasingly fragile: on Tuesday, Benjamin Netanyahu, the prime minister of Israel, accused Hamas of violating peace terms and ordered “forceful” air strikes.
“The state today once again relied on stalling tactics,” the FPA said in a statement, “with the clear aim of barring journalists from carrying out their journalistic duties. The government’s position remains unacceptable.” Tania Krämer—the chairman of the FPA and a Jerusalem-based correspondent for Germany’s Deutsche Welle—told me after the hearing: “We are hoping that the government will present a plan within this thirty-day period and not ask for another extension. We will continue to push for independent access and more details. What are they going to do during this thirty-day period? What are they doing afterwards?”
In a press conference this week, Shosh Bedrosian, a spokesperson for Netanyahu’s office, said that Israel would not maintain its ban on foreign press indefinitely: “There will come a time soon when reporters flood Gaza.” She then issued a string of warnings to stay “skeptical” of the reporting that would result. “There’s propaganda in the works once these foreign journalists do come into Gaza,” she said. “We don’t want you to be fooled.” Bedrosian claimed that “much of the destruction you’ll see” was the result of buildings and infrastructure booby-trapped by Hamas. (According to the Gaza government office, Israel has dropped a hundred thousand tons of explosives on Gaza since October 7, 2023.) Bedrosian did not address the repeated delays in the FPA petition process. A spokesperson for Netanyahu’s office did not provide additional comment.
Court delays have arisen for a number of reasons, some of them unrelated to Gaza. When Israel attacked Iran in June, for instance, a hearing scheduled for that month was suddenly postponed to October. Persico has not been surprised. “The Israeli courts tend to salute the military every time some official comes and claims that there are security reasons for anything, really,” he said. The Israeli Supreme Court, he added, is regularly criticized by Israeli human rights organizations as the “kosher stamp for the occupation.” Complicating matters: Israeli citizens, including the country’s journalists, have not been allowed into Gaza for nearly twenty years. In 2009, Amira Hass, a Haaretz reporter, spent four months reporting from Gaza and was arrested when she returned to Israel.
Lately, the foreign press and its supporters have called for other governments to place greater pressure on Israel to grant media access. At the Supreme Court, after last week’s hearing, Gilad Barnea—an attorney representing the Committee to Protect Journalists, which has filed an amicus brief in the case—said he hoped that Americans, who “are deeply involved in the situation, would also push the State of Israel to allow the entrance of journalists.”
President Donald Trump has expressed support for press access in Gaza, telling White House reporters recently: “It’s a very dangerous position to be in, as you know, if you’re a journalist, but I would like to see it.” (A surprising sentiment considering the Trump administration’s stance on journalism in the US.) Haaretz has reported that Israel’s foreign ministry is supportive of lifting the ban. But the ministry has yet to take action to do so. For now, the FPA’s only way forward is to wait for the government to change its policy.
In April, Brown University published a paper stating that Israel’s military campaign in Gaza, during which more than two hundred members of the media have lost their lives, has “killed more journalists than the US Civil War, World Wars I and II, the Korean War, the Vietnam War (including the conflicts in Cambodia and Laos), the wars in Yugoslavia in the 1990s and 2000s, and the post-9/11 war in Afghanistan, combined.” More journalists were killed in the Iraq War than in Gaza, but the duration of that war meant that about thirteen journalists were killed every year. In Gaza, the rate is closer to thirteen a month.
“A lot of us work with trusted Palestinian colleagues,” the FPA’s Krämer said. “This is our petition to say the foreign press needs to enter Gaza, but it’s not intended to take away from their tremendous work. They have really covered this war for the past two years. They have risked their lives. We know the death toll. We believe they should not carry this burden alone.”
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